What does “Yi” mean in the internal arts?
Answering a question.
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Recently a subscriber asked me by email to explain “Yi,” a term commonly used in the internal arts, and I'm always happy to oblige.
Before we go ahead, let's learn a little Chinese:
The word Yi (意) is made up of Yin (音) on top of Xin (心).
Yin means sound or tone and Xin means heart, so Yi is the sound made by the heart.
In ancient Chinese thought the heart is the center of human perception, so the Yi means that action the heart takes to instantiate its will in the world.
The most reasonable interpretation of Yi in this regard is mind, but let's not stop there.
In Chinese thought the heart is associated with fire and in the five elements creation cycle, fire creates earth, therefore Yi is associated with earth and is the child of fire and the grandchild of wood.
Yi features prominently in internal alchemy texts under the term Zhen Yi 真意, which designates the mind as having two halves, one which recognizes material form and one which is formless, or one which is post heaven and interacts with phenomena through attachment and one which is pre heaven and suddenly moves when needed.
This means Yi has both conscious and subconscious aspects and is not only confined to one type of mental activity, but broadly describes the overall use of our mental faculties in acting on perceived things in both intentional and spontaneous ways.
Common present day uses of Yi include but are not limited to:
意念 Yi Nian: to place one's mental attention on something,
意思 Yi Si: the meaning of something,
意识 Yi Shi: the perceptual mind.
Yi is a highly valued concept in the internal martial arts of Taiji, Xingyi and Bagua and has similar meanings in each style.
Since the increase in popularity of internal styles in the West, Yi has often been described as intention, or perhaps some slightly more sophisticated teachers refer to it as intention and attention, but both of these meanings do not convey the range of meaning the term has to offer.
It would be hard to cover everything in this article, but let me show you a few ways the term is used:
1: The mind: a perfectly good meaning of Yi is just mind. It can mean that you are aware of things around you and what you perceive has to be organized by a response in which the mind decides on actions to take on phenomena in your range of awareness.
2: Intention: to intend to do something is part of the chain which causes a physical action to take place. Intention includes both the focus on something as well as the initial spark which causes us to take an action.
3: Attention: the mind can also remain with something in its field of awareness such as a sensation, a sense of where things are in space, the sense of the body in a particular body etc..
4: Perception: Yi Shi means perception and refers to anything we perceive in our awareness.
5: Body mind relationship: Yi informs our postures, movements and responses. For instance, Xingyi Quan is an art where the mind coordinates with the body to form specific postures and shapes that are useful in martial arts contexts.
6: Subconscious: the mind also has an automatic response to things happening around it which leads to subconscious reflex etc...
It is very important in Chinese martial arts not to try to force terms to be one thing in an absolute sense, since they often shift around in meaning relative to context.
I'd like to explain one aspect of Yi that I wish were more commonly understood in the Chinese martial arts world in the west, which is the relation between pre and post heaven:
Post Heaven in the martial arts means conscious, or something that we act on in a cognitive way, while Pre Heaven means an subconscious reflex.
The idea of the internal arts is to train through cognitive activity in order to achieve coordination and response patterns which work in combat, but then refine those to become automatic so we can do it without thinking.
It is very similar to the three parts of movement acquisition discussed in sports science:
1: Cognitive level: the level at which we are learning a new movement and have to consciously work our way through it in order to master each step,
2: Associative: this level is when we start to be able to perform the movement more naturally and gradually become less reliant on thinking our way through it.
3: Autonomous: at this point the movement becomes natural and does not require us to use our thoughts to navigate it any more.
Internal arts also follow this model, but as a movement becomes deeper and we master it, the autonomous level requires us to be able to apply it spontaneously in self defense, thus leading to a subconscious or unconscious reflex which just comes out when needed.
This is what it means for the mind to have a pre-heaven element in the martial arts, whereas post-heaven is when we are learning the movement and its application.
These ideas in martial arts are all very practical and not mysterious at all, but because of the tradition of being mysterious in Chinese martial arts and because Western students are often looking for spiritual learning as opposed to practicing martial arts as a form of exercise and self defense, they tend to over inflate terms like Yi, causing them to lose their original meanings and thus making it more difficult to master the martial arts.
I hope this explanation, while limited, was also useful.
All the best,
Rob.